T he GNU/Linux "usbnet" Driver http://www.linux-usb.org/usbnet/ The GNU/Linux "usbnet" Driver Framework David Brownell <
[email protected]> Last Modified: 27 September 2005 USB is a general purpose host-to-device (master-to-slave) I/O bus protocol. It can easily carry network traffic, multiplexing it along with all the other bus traffic. This can be done directly, or with one of the many widely available USB-to-network adapter products for networks like Ethernet, ATM, DSL, POTS, ISDN, and cable TV. There are several USB class standards for such adapters, and many proprietary approaches too. This web page describes how to use the Linux usbnet driver, CONFIG_USB_USBNET in most Linux 2.4 (or later) kernels. This driver originally (2.4.early) focussed only on supporting less conventional types of USB networking devices. In current Linux it's now a generalized core, supporting several kinds of network devices running under Linux with "minidrivers", which are separate modules that can be as small as a pair of static data tables. One type is a host-to-host network cable. Those are good to understand, since some other devices described here need to be administered like those cables; Linux bridging is a useful tool to make those two-node networks more manageable, and Windows XP includes this functionality too. Linux PDAs, and other embedded systems like DOCSIS cable modems, are much the same. They act as Hosts in the networking sense while they are "devices" in the USB sense, so they behave like the other end of a host-to-host cable.